Search This Blog

Watandost in Urdu, Turkish and Farsi means "friend of the nation or country". The blog contains news and views about Pakistan and broader South West Asia that are insightful but are often not part of the headlines. It also covers major debates in Muslim societies across the world.

Beyond conspiracy theories...

THE Mumbai massacre has been a shocking event for all civilised souls across the world, including those in Pakistan.

As is always the case, the search for responsibility began and, almost immediately, fingers were pointed at Pakistan. Equally promptly, denial followed from this end.

However, the world community appears to be accepting the Indian view and Pakistan is under enormous pressure from all quarters. The government has been aware of the gravity of the situation and the complete diplomatic isolation of the country. It has acted responsibly and has taken a series of measures on the domestic and diplomatic fronts to limit the damage.

Questions arise as to who could be responsible for this barbaric act and what could have been the motive. Three classes of conspiracy theories can be discerned. One, there is the Indian view that the perpetrators were Pakistanis and the attack originated in Pakistan. It is stated that Pakistan has been using non-state actors since the 1980s to forward its regional agenda in Afghanistan and Kashmir. In Afghanistan, their motive was to bring down the pro-Soviet, pro-India regime and to install a pro-Pakistan dispensation.

Post-2001 it is stated that these non-state actors have been operating with the support of rogue elements within the country’s intelligence agencies, meaning without official sanction. Their theatre of operation is now limited to Kashmir and to the occupying power, India, with the objective of bleeding India to the point of conceding Kashmir.

The second view is that the Mumbai attacks were executed by the Indian intelligence. India, it is said, has been unnerved by the sustained peaceful agitation for independence in Kashmir, aggravated by the sharp communal split in the held state. India’s claim that the Mumbai attackers had trained in camps in Azad Kashmir as well as implied threats that India could launch attacks on such camps are noteworthy in this respect. It is suggested that a successful Indian military operation in Kashmir would effectively exclude Pakistan as a party to the dispute and weaken the independence movement therein to enable India to force a political settlement on its own terms.

The third view is that the Mumbai operation was part of an Indo-Israeli-US conspiracy with the larger objective of denuclearising Pakistan. The immediate objective could be to prove to the world that the Pakistani security establishment is incapable of controlling the militant establishment which can hijack the country’s nuclear arsenal. If this is indeed the case, one can expect more such sponsored attacks.

The latter explanations may sound preposterous, given that half a dozen US and Israeli citizens and more than 100 Indians have been killed. This kind of modus operandi is, however, not unknown in the world of covert intelligence operations. Of course, it was necessary for the nature and scale of the attack to be audacious, the targets high profile and symbolic, and the death toll high if the desired ends were to be attained. The actual involvement of Pakistani nationals is irrelevant. Anybody in the world could have covertly hired any number of Pakistanis to carry out the operation for them.

Herein lies the catch for Pakistan. Of the above three scenarios, all of them may be true, none of them may be true, or some of them may be partly true. That, however, is not relevant. What is relevant is the fact that Pakistanis could have been hired by foreign elements. This implies that there are enough Pakistanis with the necessary ideological mentoring to be available for jihadist operations. And these jihadis do not emerge as individual products.

Clearly, there is an infrastructure with organisational, financial and operational resources to recruit, indoctrinate and train the jihadis. Clearly, such an infrastructure cannot exist and operate without an element of tolerance or support from powerful elements aligned to state agencies. Otherwise, how is it possible that sophisticated arms can be stockpiled in the centre of the capital city, Islamabad, enabling the ‘students’ of Lal Masjid/Jamia Hafsa to fight the Pakistan Army for days?

How is it possible that A.Q. Khan can engage in worldwide nuclear smuggling without the intelligence agencies deputed to protect him failing to discover his operations? How is it possible that hundreds of firearms are brought out and liberally used in clashes in Karachi and the intelligence agencies cannot identify the source and supply channels of such arms?

Apart from the bloody mayhem these outfits may or may not be causing in neighbouring countries, they have certainly torn Pakistani society apart.

Either the nation’s intelligence agencies are completely incompetent or totally complicit. If it is the former, then the country is in mortal danger. If a mere imam of a mosque can stockpile arms or if a high-security state official can smuggle sensitive material out of the country then it must be equally possible for an enemy country to smuggle in its agents and arms for internal sabotage in the event of a war. If it is the latter, then the criminal adventurism of the self-styled protectors of national interest is bestowing on the country international disdain and endangering its stability and security.

In the 1980s, the ‘non-state actors’ paradigm was used within the ambit of the US and western global strategy. Understandably, no aspersions were cast internationally with respect to the legitimacy of the means being employed. Of course, the paradigm was irresponsible and criminal then and is equally so now. The difference is that, in the current global scenario, US patronage is no longer available and this paradigm is simply unacceptable. The cost that Pakistan will have to pay for continuing such a course of action will be exorbitant.

It is likely that the stage can be set for US-led international forces to carry out an operation aimed at eliminating the presumed capacity to mount terrorist operations abroad — and to prevent nuclear weapons from falling into the wrong hands. Given, however, that India will be a partner in any such operation, an attempt will be made to disable our intelligence capability altogether. The implications for national security will be grave.

It would, therefore, be prudent for the country’s security leadership to undertake to renounce the highly counterproductive use of non-state actors as a policy tool and launch a full-fledged clean-up operation on their own initiative. An operation of some sort is currently underway. That is not sufficient. The leadership of jihadi organisations may appear fierce with their bushy beards and fiery rhetoric. However, a more potent danger is posed by their handlers. Pakistan’s security demands that these handlers be neutralised.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Inside Story about Musharraf-Mahmood TussleHassan Abbas: September 24, 2006

General Pervez Musharraf’s memoir In the Line of Fire is expected to generate a lot of debate and discussion in the days to come. Except some western journalists and Musharraf’s close friends (three ghost writers) hardly anyone has had a chance yet to read the book from cover to cover. The excerpts of the book leaked through Indian media and General Musharraf’s statements to some American media outlets however have already created some controversies. In the United States, controversy is considered a positive thing, so the book is bound to become a bestseller here, but in Pakistan probably the opposite is true.

This article is not a review of the book (as I haven’t got hold of a copy yet), but it endeavors to throw some light on the widely reported Musharraf comment about the Armitage threat conveyed through Lieutenant General Mahmood Ahmed, the then Director General of the ISI. I had done research on this speci…

FAISALABAD: Chief Justice of Pakistan Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry has said that a society can progress only if it ensures the supremacy of the Constitution, which guarantees the rights of every citizen and defines roles for organs of the state.

Addressing the Faisalabad Bar Association on Sunday, the chief justice said that the separation of the judiciary from the executive was vital and only a free judiciary could provide real justice. He quoted a saying of Hazrat Ali, the fourth caliph of Islam, that a “society can survive with kufr (infidelity), but not injustice”.

“Every citizen must follow the Constitution. A society can progress only if it has supremacy of the Constitution,” peace and rule of law, he said. “We cannot get rid of the label of developing country without ensuring the security of the life and property of citizens,” he said.

As expected, the government of Saudi Arabia has refused to lift the ban on Pakistanis below the age of 40 years from performing umra. It was futile on the part of federal religious affairs minister Mohammad Ejazul Haq to visit Riyadh to try and make the Saudis change their mind on the issue. The Saudis formulate their policies after much thinking and in line with their national interest and decisions once taken are rarely changed.

Back home, Ejazul Haq sounded defensive when he told reporters that the ban would stay because the Saudi government had complained that over 100,000 Pakistanis had overstayed in Saudi Arabia after reaching there on the pretext of performing umra. Before leaving for Saudi Arabia, he had expressed concern over the Pakistan-specific umra restriction and had promised to take up the matter with the Saudi authorities. One could understand that he was on a weak wicket and could only request the Saudis…